German physicist Gerd Binnig studied at Goethe University and the University of Frankfurt, and has spent most of his career at IBM. In 1981, with his colleague Heinrich Rohrer, he designed the first scanning tunneling microscope, which uses quantum mechanical effects to magnify images of conducting or semiconducting materials to the extent that individual atoms are easily recognizable. In 1986 they invented the atomic force microscope, which uses an almost unfathomably sensitive stylus to mechanically probe surface contours at an even finer level of clarity. "I couldn't stop looking at the images", Binnig said of the scanning tunneling microscope's preliminary tests. "It was entering a new world." In 1986 he and Rohrer won the Nobel Prize, sharing the highest honor in science honor with Ernst Ruska, who invented the electron microscope.